ESA Student Section Schedule

Coming soon...

Places to go in New Orleans

The ESA Student Section board has highlighted some interesting locations, suggestions from local students in New Orleans, that you may want to visit during ESA. There are restaurants, breweries, and locations of interest highlighted below.

How to get the most out of your ESA experience

This outline provides tips and suggestions from Student Section officers with years of experience attending ESA Annual Conferences. Below, you will find tips on navigating the wide breadth and number of science presentations, as well as tips for networking, and broaching the subject of your desire for a job or a graduate position with a faculty or research scientist.

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ESA Student Section Services

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Attend the Student Section events. There is a good variety of events, some are social, others are focused on networking and skill building...all are worth your while and a great way to meet other students and inspiring mentors!

Go to student events! Attend the Student Orientation, which will explain how students can get the most out of the conference and not get overwhelmed.

If you’re at ESA for the first time contact our officers we’ll be happy to invite you to join us for dinner/drinks/coffee!

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Science Presentations and Burnout

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Don't burn out by over-programming yourself into too many sessions, which is easy to do at a big conference with so many cool people and research. Take breaks!

Go to the conference with a goal: meet 5 people, learn something new about a topic new to you.

Ask around to see who is an exceptionally good speaker and go to those talks, because they are sure to be good, even if the topic isn't something you think about a lot--you might get inspired!

Ask good questions and know that there are no bad questions :-).

Ask your advisor to introduce you to people that they know and that you also want to meet. I have found this is the best and easiest way to get to know someone new.

Find a 'talk buddy'...someone who you team up with so that if there are two talks going on at the same time, you can each go to one, and then report back to each other.

Go to organized symposia vs. contributed sessions...these often have better organization, more of a cohesive theme, which can sometimes make them more interesting.

My thought about conferences, particularly big conferences with concurrent sessions, is that it's really easy to over-schedule yourself by trying to get to absolutely every talk you are interested in.

I have found that it is often counter-productive because you spend more time thinking about where you need to be next than what you are listening to at the moment. You also invariably miss the first part of a talk, or skip the questions (often the most interesting part of a talk) as you are jumping rooms. I've learned to choose the really important talks that I want to see (hear?), but then to sacrifice some talks in order to stay in a particular session longer. I've gotten much more out of conferences this way. Something else I try to do is to occasionally go to sessions that I know nothing about. They often turn out to be my favorite sessions because I can just listen and learn.

Take advantage of workshops (often times there are super cool opportunities to develop skills that you can't come by easily at your home institution).

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Networking

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Don't just hang out with people you already know...!

Go out to dinner with cool people (how to get invited is the tricky bit...but you can invite people too!). This is honestly the best thing about conferences to me...informal time to just chat with other researchers about your ideas/their ideas/your life/their life.

Take advantage of any networking/happy hour/mixer events as these are arguably the most important aspect of the conference - networking!

Don’t be afraid to go up to a speaker you like, introduce yourself and tell them you liked their talk and converse with them.

A good ice-breaker for meeting new people is to ask them what presentations/sessions they found interesting; ask them to summarize the talk for you.

If you meet someone who has similar interests, ask them who the good speakers or good mentors are.

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Looking for Jobs, Grad & Post-Doc Positions

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Check out the job board (usually around the poster session area).

Network, network, network! (See above for tips)

If you are giving a poster, have professional looking business cards available or handouts with your contact information and highlights of your recent work (publications, presentations, research, etc.).